Tile Layer Pro

Tile Layer Pro editing uncompressed art in Sonic 1.

Tile Layer Pro, by SnowPro, is the Win32 version of the popular ROM hacking utility program Tile Layer. Despite the sound of its name, Tile Layer Pro is not a commercial piece of software, it is in fact freeware. The Pro suffix, so commonly used to indicate commercial versions (eg. Realplayer Pro), in this case only signifies the Windows version of the program.

The main features of the program include:

• Support for ROMs of almost any 8 or 16 bit system (NES, Game Boy/Color/Advance, Virtual Boy, Master System, Sega Genesis, SNES).
• If you are viewing a ROM and some of it is stored in a different bit depth than is default for the system (eg if you look at a SNES ROM - default 4BPP - and you need to find a 2BPP font), dynamic switching of viewing formats is available.
• The program can open up to 256 ROM files at once (if you have the system resources for it).
• Individual Tile editor which has pixel by pixel editing, rotate, flip and undo commands.
• Tile Arranger - like the Clipboard in Tile Layer, but stores Memory Addresses, so editing a tile in the tile arranger edits it in the ROM file immediately as well.
• Palette selector, which allows you to use a premade one, or make your own (you can specify one for each ROM image if you like) so that the graphics look correct in the editor.
• Import /Export feature which allows hackers to export tiles to a graphics program such as The GIMP or Photoshop for editing, and then to import them back into the ROM when finished.
• Copying and pasting between different locations in (if you like) different ROMs. If, for example, you want to add an English font to a game then you can select it all in one English game, copy it, then paste it into the other game. This eliminates the tedious tile by tile approach that Tile Layer had.
• Excellent coding which ensures it is fast and stable. I've only crashed it once, and that was doing idiotic stuff, and even then it only crashed the ROM file, leaving the main window working, so I reopened the ROM and continued.

Because SMD is an interleaved format, Genesis ROM files need to be converted to BIN files, but seeing as TLP doesn't recognize BIN as a file format, files must be opened using the "All Files..." command, then have their format to Genesis. A hack of TLP by PACHUKA circumvents this step.